WD 5000AAJS, WD Caviar SE, used to be in a MyBook.
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Osama ALASSIRYMay 31 '09 at 19:46

@Osama ALASSIRY - then it's not the case. if content of drive is important - look for data recovery service, if it's less important - try replacing electronics with one from another this from the same series [ not just model ].
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pQdMay 31 '09 at 20:08

If there drive spins up, then there's a good chance that it's the board on the back that's failed. If you can get an identical drive (ebay is often good), you can try swapping the boards over, which might let you read from then current drive.

If you've got very important data on it, and don't have backups, I'd advise taking it to a professional, trying to do it yourself with no experience will probably just end up destroying any chance of getting your data back.

I accidentally, burned a stripe through the controller board of a ATA drive (I.e. there was a burn track in a line, across the chips and traces). I happened to have a matching spare drive, took the controller off, copied the data, and threw away the burned one. Was very lucky.
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geoffcMay 31 '09 at 17:41

Get a SATA-USB adapter. That way you can fiddle with it all you want. Boot into a Linux live-cd first, it will probably give you much more info than Windows -- try "dmesg" to see what the kernel has to say.

There are some software packages that are not free but are worth it you can get to do recovery. They work on the basis that reading some sectors off the drive may still work, so the software is smart enough to know by reading the sectors if its a word doc or an mp3 ect. and put the file back together (although you have to go through the nightmare of re-naming everything as filenames are lost)

They're useful if the drive is from a desktop or laptop & your worried about getting pictures & word documents off there. The two i have used with some success have been ZAR and OnTrack

I've had success with EasyRecovery Pro but this does assume that you can get the hardware up and running as mentioned in other posts. Any drive that I'm asked to look at that's at risk, I image first with Acronis True Image. But once again, assumes the hardware is working.

If you still can't get anything off of it, you probably are going to have to send it off to someplace that specializes in retrieving data off of failing hard-drives, but there is no guarantee that they will be able to get anything off of it either.